This is the first book from the 37Signals duo Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It's all free online and though it's not the best reading experience, it's easy to skip around. (Use the Kindle browser extension to save chapters to your Kindle for later.)

The book focuses on building software but the lessons apply to writers, marketers and entrepreneurs. It's a quick, easy and fun read.

Actually, a lot of very good reasons. Check out the post to read them all.

People without a firm sense of who they are, what they want, and where their interests and passions lie are vulnerable to this. They end up taking their cues from family, friends, and teachers because they don’t have an inner compass to guide them.

Every person walking this earth is different, and changes from month to month and from year to year. Once you realize there is no “best” of anything, it becomes much easier to seek out what is “best for you” and make career decisions based on your own criteria, not based on any conventional wisdom about what success looks like.

As a side note, Michael Wolf is using Quora in an interesting way. He provides in-depth answers to questions (like this one), and re-publishes the answers on his own site.

Here's a look at how seriously Airbnb treats the customer experience: They actually hired animators from Pixar to help storyboard the entire customer journey.

Airbnb started the project, appropriately code-named "Snow White," by creating a list of the emotional moments that comprise an Airbnb stay. They built the most important of those moments into stories.

What I've been up to:

Last week, I created @email_ideas — a Twitter account to share bits and pieces of inspiration from my inbox. I share three short findings each day. Here's a sample: